“It’s Been a Lot—But It’s a Dream”
Patrick Ball has been quietly carving out a name for himself in the theater world, and now, with his breakout role as Dr. Langdon on Max’s “The Pitt”, he’s bringing that same precision to the small screen.
With a background in Shakespeare—he’s currently playing Hamlet at the Mark Taper Forum—Ball has found a surprising overlap between the Bard and the ER. “Most of us don’t know what a supraclavicular subclavian is,” Ball says. “But if I know what it is, and more importantly, what I need to do to save the patient in front of me, the language comes last. It becomes about the action.”
Created by John Wells and set in a high-intensity trauma hospital in Pittsburgh, “The Pitt” follows a group of first-year residents navigating their first day of medical training alongside healthcare professionals working under extreme pressure. The series is led by ER alum Noah Wyle as Dr. Robbie Stenson, with the cast also featuring breakout turns from fresh faces and established stars, including Tracy Ifeachor, Taylor Dearden, and Ball as Dr. Oliver Langdon, a gifted but emotionally guarded trauma surgeon who’s trying to impress his mentor, Dr. Robbie.
“The Pitt” has quickly emerged as a frontrunner in the Emmy race, thanks in part to its episodic structure, whereby each of the fifteen episodes is another hour on the same day, from the morning to evening shift. For Ball, stepping into a series regular role was a career milestone and involved a steep learning curve. “I didn’t know how to read a call sheet when I showed up,” Ball shares. “There were a lot of logistical elements to figure out. But it’s been a dream.”
As Dr. Langdon, Ball brings confidence and dynamism to a character struggling not only with life-or-death decisions but personal demons. His storyline around addiction is one of the show’s most devastating and grounded arcs. “To be a part of raising awareness to that problem and hopefully increasing some compassionate understanding around the disease of addiction was a responsibility I did not take lightly,” he explains.
Patrick Ball spoke with Awards Focus about the technical and emotional layers of portraying a trauma surgeon, his time at “bootcamp” with real ER doctors, shares stories from the set, including working with Noah Wyle, and what he’s taking with him into season two.
Awards Focus: You’re currently playing Hamlet at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Did you find any similarities in preparing to play Hamlet as with playing Dr. Langdon in “The Pitt”?
Patrick Ball: I’ve been doing Shakespeare for a while. My first play was “The Taming of the Shrew” back when I was like 15. I ended up doing a lot of Shakespeare at Yale School of Drama, and I think there is something about that heightened text that really made me ready to play Langdon.
When you’re doing Shakespeare, often you’re dealing with heightened text that may not be easily understood on a literal level by an audience member, but it’s finding the intentionality behind the language and being able to play in action through these medical terms. Most of us don’t know what a supraclavicular subclavian is, but if I know what a supraclavicular subclavian is and more importantly, what I need to do and what I need for my scene partner, and what I need to do to save the patient in front of me, the language truly comes last. The primary thing becomes what you’re doing and what you need.
AF: Within the 15-episode season of “The Pitt”, there is so much medical terminology and you perform so many intricate procedures. Did it come easily to you while auditioning and learning the sides?
Ball: No, I wouldn’t say it came easily, but the sides that they gave me made it very clear that there were very clear relationships. I think one of the sides they gave me was one of the scenes in episode one with the woman who got run over by a train. Langdon is having a back-and-forth with Garcia, the surgical resident, and he’s initiating Mel into her first patient. So, there were very clear relationships set up in the space. The relationships had to be alive because these are people that, like you and I, have never done a super clavicular subclavian, but Langdon has done these things frequently.
If I’m sitting here enmeshed in the technicality and impressiveness of this language, then I am, by backwards logic, less believable as a doctor because doctors don’t stop and appreciate the complexity of what they’re doing often because they do it frequently. So, getting to a point where you can just move past that and have confidence in what you’re doing and really playing the relationships with the people in the room with you was really the name of the game from the first audition.
AF: How did you start to breakdown the scripts and the relationships around Dr. Langdon?
Ball: It was a really fun challenge for a number of reasons. Not the obvious one, being this is all one day, so I have to play the immediate scene and objective of what I have to do to save this patient in front of me. I shot this scene in episode three, which we shot two months prior, but that was only three hours ago in the world of the show. So, being able to track all of these personal arcs over the grand scheme of things while playing the very complex micro-objectives of each procedure was really fun. The great thing about a season one is many of these relationships with all the med students are all brand new, so it’s all about crafting these relationships in real time and discovering a lot about one another in real time, while also having to pay attention to the person whose life you’re going to save.
AF: I have heard about the bootcamp. What was that like to explore learning about the medical field, and moving past the language and into the confidence of a Doctor?
Ball: I just got home from it. We’re in it right now for season two. They did the same thing last year, and we’re doing the same thing this year. I think last year was two weeks, but we have a week of medical training where they come in and teach us a bit about terminology. They teach us some basic procedures and, as important as anything, they expose us to real doctors out in the practice that are actually doing this so that we can also just get a read for what their lives are like and how they are. That is as useful as the medicine in just getting to spend time with them and talk with them about their lives, and see how energetically they carry themselves.
AF: In what ways did it also help having medical professionals working behind the scenes on the show and helping with the blocking of a scene?
Ball: We have a number of real-life medical professionals on set with us all the time. We have, I think, a rotating cast of five medical directors who are headed up by Joe Sachs, who’s an executive producer on the show. All of them are currently practicing emergency medicine, so they will come and spend part of their week with us on set, and then they will go and do shifts out in an emergency room somewhere, and they will be the ones that do all of the medical blocking and show us how to do the procedures and make sure that we’re doing everything as accurately as possible. But also, we have something called med techs. We have a number of nurses and nurse practitioners, and physician assistants who act as background artists on our show. So, at any given moment, we have half a dozen to a dozen real-life ER workers there with us to sort of keep us honest and tell us how it actually happens.
AF: You’d been a guest star on “Law and Order”, but this was your first series regular role. What was the biggest challenge for you coming into a season and getting into the rhythm of the television production?
Ball: There was a lot of new stuff. I didn’t know how to read a call sheet whenever I showed up on set. There were a lot of logistical elements that were new to figure out. I think there is something that happens in TV that doesn’t happen in the theater in that once something’s in the can and you move on, you never get that back, which is a new feeling for somebody that has primarily lived in the theater where we work in draft and now I’m going to come to the theater tomorrow night and do it again. It continues to grow and grow and grow and grow.
In stepping into this, it was really amazing because it was a seven-month process, so it was a long time to spend with this character and spend with this world. But once a brick has been laid, it’s been laid. It’s in cement, it’s not going anywhere, so you have to build on whatever happened. That was a learning experience, and learning a lot about the editing process and how to act to the cut and how to break down a script knowing how it was going to get cut together. That was a real learning process. On the back end here, with the sort of attention that this show has gotten has had its own fresh set of learning curves. So, it’s been a lot, but it’s a dream. It’s amazing.
AF: What kind of advice did Noah Wiley have within that space, having been on another medical show for many years?
Ball: He was an incredible mentor, and he had a ton of advice. He was also very wise because he let us figure out a lot of things for ourselves. He made himself very available and would give advice when needed, but also was very generous in allowing us the time, especially early in the season, to sort of figure out our way of doing it, which I think is a sign of a really, really good mentor and really good teacher.
AF: What was it like to explore the confrontation between Robbie and Dr. Langdon in episode ten, and having Noah as a scene partner?
Ball: It was great. I knew that scene was coming. That was a scene they had me do as part of the screen test round of auditioning. I didn’t really know what was between episode one and episode 10, but I knew that it was alleged that Dr. Langdon was going to fall off at a certain point. It was looming over me for much of the season. Then, when we got there, it was just really fun, and it was really special. I think we both went into that scene thinking it was going to be a one kind of scene, and we expected it to be more of a fight than it was. It ended up being just more of a breakup. These are two guys that really do care about each other, and so it ended up being sadder than I think either of us expected, but it was a real joy to do because it was really courageous. John Wells and Noah had created a space where that was possible.
AF: What responsibility did you feel in portraying a medical professional going through addiction and peeking behind the curtain of the realities that it can be for some professionals in the medical industry?
Ball: It was a huge responsibility. I spoke about the med techs that are on set with us every day, and I would have these med techs come up to me, and especially as the addiction storyline started coming to a head, they would come up to me and say that this is a problem at every hospital that they work at. You have these frontline workers who are exposed to a level of trauma that would be unbearable for most people. They’re exposed to this level of trauma every day. They play life and death poker every day. My mom and dad are frontline workers. My mom had held the record for most saves in Guilford County, North Carolina, and brought 80 people back from being flatlined. I often wonder, if 80 people were saved, how many did they lose? They never talked about it as a kid growing up. So, to be a part of raising awareness of that problem and hopefully increasing some compassionate understanding around the disease of addiction was a responsibility that I did not take lightly.
AF: What are you taking with you into this next season of the show that you learned from your experience on the first?
Ball: I think that faster is not always better. Sometimes it’s okay to stop; sometimes it’s okay to not be okay. Sometimes it’s okay to slow down. I’m excited to come into season two and see what happens when you take your foot off the gas a little bit and actually allow yourself to be present. It can be a scary thing.